Learning from the sublime? A Coleridgean footnote

This is from the end of a long footnote in chapter 4 of the Biographia where he's discussing the hostile reaction to Lyrical Ballads. I record it here so I can come back to it when I'm working on my important summer project:

“the connection between two conceptions, without that sensation of such connection which is supplied by habit. The man feels, as if he were standing on his head, though he cannot but see that he is truly standing on his feet. This, as a painful sensation, will of course have a tendency to associate itself with the person who occasions it; even as persons, who have been by painful means restored from derangement, are known to feel an involuntary dislike towards their physician” (BL 1.73n).

Monday Morning Dream Analysis

I have dreams probably twice a week in which random people are in my apartment or tring to get in, whether for benign or more evil purposes. Sometimes the door gets broken down. Other times they are just here. Occasionally I know the people. More than often I don't. I'm pretty sure my old landlady from Astoria made an appearance in last night's dreams. I can't tell if I'm lonely or just still can't believe that I live by myself after so long with others.

The dream that woke me up at 4:28 this morning involved another favorite theme: Wisconsin. (Although this "Wisconsin" house could have been in suburban Chicago--I do dream weird Chicago-and-suburbs-scapes every now and then as well.) I was in a guest bedroom with a bunch of framed family pictures on a side table. Somehow the door hit the table and a couple of the pictures fell off, breaking the glass. They were both pictures of me (one that looked a bit like my Facebook profile). I went into the kitchen to ask my parents whether it was bad luck to break frames with your own picture in them and woke up before they could give me an answer.

Text and the single-ish girl grad student

See, now, I know this New York Times essay about making decisions about romantic partners based on the contents of their libraries is supposed to be aimed at people like me. And, given that it's the most emailed article at the moment, it's clearly working on some level. And I won't say that I didn't put a bit of thought into how my bookshelves are arranged in my apartment, and I won't say that when I was in college I never slept with a dude because of his books, and I won't pretend that books didn't figure rather heavily into my relationships with The Ex and The Professor. And, okay, there was that one moment with K where he was over here and said in this kind of plaintive what-if voice, "we even have the same books"--and I'd be lying if that wasn't one of those things that made me think (wrongly, as it appears) that we could be friends after the whole kind of sketchy affair thing was over.

However. I still affirm that some of the best sex I've ever had in my life was with The Lawyer, a man who owns almost no books. Like, I think I saw maybe three in his apartment in all the times I was over there, and I'm pretty sure at least one of them was one that I brought and took with when I left. A younger version of myself would have found this to be anathema to everything I stood for, and I have to say that I had at least a moment of pause when I realized that. (It's not like he didn't read things ever--he is a pretty big-deal lawyer and reads a lot for a living. He also told me once that he has some books in storage.) But I got over it and at some point realized it was kind of hot, especially coming off things with my Ex. (Those of you who know him know what I'm talking about.) And I don't think it's just me, either. As far as I know, most of the women that The Lawyer (you know what, let's just call him E) dated from Nerve were academics in one way or another; if I'm remembering correctly, he ended up dumping me for an art history professor. And we had a conversation once where I told him my theory about how all these academic women were attracted to him because having sex in a room without books in it was probably dirty-hot for a lot of us.

It is more than that, though. The one comment in the Times article that totally makes sense is the one about how shared books can generate a false sense of shared ideas:

Marco Roth, an editor at the magazine n+1, said: “I think sometimes it’s better if books are just books. It’s part of the romantic tragedy of our age that our partners must be seen as compatible on every level.” Besides, he added, “sometimes people can end up liking the same things for vastly different reasons, and they build up these whole private fantasy lives around the meaning of these supposedly shared books, only to discover, too late, that the other person had a different fantasy completely.” After all, a couple may love “The Portrait of a Lady,” but if one half identifies with Gilbert Osmond and the other with Isabel Archer, they may have radically different ideas about the relationship.

I mean, there's something to be said for someone who gets a lot of your references and all. The Professor and I started hanging out together because we could talk Derrida together and shared an appreciation for a certain Victorian novelist who isn't Dickens. In general, though, and especially with men who are not themselves academics, books can be more trouble than they're worth. Obviously, I would like to end up with a dude who does more than watch Rock of Love all day. (On the other hand, I completely prefer the elliptical machine near the TV playing Rock of Love to the elliptical machine where I'm left to the company of my New Yorker when I'm at the gym.) And obviously, I don't want to have to continually defend my reading at all to someone. But that's not the experience I had, at least not on the internet. What I got from Nerve were all these guys who weren't academics but kind of wanted to be and to some extent were crazier autodidacts than I was, and with me this translated into an alternation of fetishizing what I do for a living (is what I do for a living kind of cool and awesome all the time? Yeah. Is it also just another profession among many, and one with perhaps more of its share of demands and ridiculous hoops? Yeah.) and giving off the impression that I am somehow falling short of their expectations because I don't want to be cool and literary all the time. People who mostly know me in academic and other mostly non-sexual contexts are always surprised when I tell them that there's a group of dudes in the world who find me shallow--these are often the same dudes who buy me a drink and expect me to validate them for reading Moby-Dick. Have I read Moby-Dick? Yes, I have. Do I need to troll the internet for strangers with whom to discuss it? No.

I do know a lot of my personal reaction to this has to do with the specific terms of my relationship with my ex-boyfriend and especially the pressures he put on me because I was doing something that he, through an unfortunate convergence of circumstances and bad planning, couldn't pull off himself. In a broader sense, though, I think I spent so much time in high school and college pushing people off because I wasn't sure that they only liked me for my mind that I ended up making my life then much harder than it needed to be. I'm more comfortable with being liked for other reasons now, and I'm trying at least in a halfhearted way to keep those other reasons in play. (Ironically, I only really shop when I'm depressed, so I haven't bought anything in awhile. I should be able to justify something for the Toronto trip, though.) I joke that the longer I spend in grad school, the more vain that I get. It's not totally a joke, it's more a combination of trying to control the few things I can control and of still finding it wonderful not to have my Ex putting pressure on me all the time.

With that being said, I should finish making my presentation assignment handout and contemplate a trip to the gym tomorrow. I didn't go at all last week, and I'm sure that's partly why I got so damn manic.

Not exactly archive fever

Why is it that I can find the journals that record all of my personal traumas and triumphs, as well as a good deal of everything I've read or worked on over the past two years except for the journal that would contain all the notes I made while reading the Biographia Literaria last summer?

Also, how could I have not typed up more than a couple lines of notes from the Biographia? Irritatingly, I'm sure that decision had something to do with taking notes in my journal.

Relatedly: I sometimes wish my life writing and work writing could be more separate because there's really no way for me not to be reminded of what I was doing and feeling as I search to figure out what I was reading. This is sometimes inconvenient. But I don't know how to do otherwise in the moment, and I think that if I were to be able to separate them more effectively, I would start to be a very different (and possibly lesser) scholar.

It's really noisy in the building today, for some reason. Probably time to decamp to school soon and try to finish that damn conference paper.

On Mary Wollstonecraft and running to stand still

What a long time it requires for us to know ourselves; and yet almost everyone of has more of this knowledge than he is willing to own, even to himself. I cannot immediately determine whether I ought to rejoice at having turned over in this solitude a new page in the history of my own heart, though I may venture to assure you that a further acquaintance with mankind only tends to increase my respect for your judgment, and esteem for your character. --Mary Wollstonecraft, Letters Written During a Short Residence in Sweden, Norway, and Denmark (1796)

My committee member and I met to talk through Godwin and Wollstonecraft this afternoon. When I got to the coffeeshop (the same one where I once saw Paul Bettany), I told her that I'd figured out what Godwin meant about the Letters... being a book calculated to make a reader fall in love with its author.

Unfortunately, it came out sounding a little bit lame. But it still had the feeling of a profound revelation for me when it first crossed my mind this morning in the frenzy of preparation for the discussion now over (this has been the general motion of the week). This is how I wrote it in my notes this morning:

Does G find the letters to be calculated to make the reader fall in love with the author in part because the author is still in love with the person she’s addressing? Actually, it just occurred to me that there’s another thing here…there’s something hot for a certain kind of man about an obviously intelligent woman who feels—-and feeling here is almost entirely inseparable from suffering and from doing so with a kind of frankness—-allowing oneself to be seen at one’s lowest point: as W herself says at one point: “I felt like a bird fluttering on the ground unable to mount; yet unwilling to crawl tranquilly like a reptile, whilst still conscious it had wings.”

I should have just blogged this thought when I had it because it looks lame here, too. It felt more profound in the context of rereading my notes on the Letters and also, I think, in light of the fact that this week I have begun to articulate to some of my committee members and friends and really anyone who will listen the emotional effects of my orals reading. Namely, that I have been much happier since I got Charlotte Bronte out of my system. Because that was also about suffering and the reification of it by others. Yet, it's also connected to well, shallower things, more personal ones, some just ridiculous. The emotional equivalents of the ligers and tigons that distracted me from Tennyson earlier in the week.

But perhaps I should go back further. I started working on Wollstonecraft about two years ago. And I realized today, in going back and rereading certain texts and my notes on others, that I am much better positioned to understand Wollstonecraft than I was in the spring of 2006. If nothing else, I am profoundly grateful that a woman like her existed and that she left an archive. And I am grateful that Godwin wrote the Memoirs of the Author of A Vindication of the Rights of Woman, even with all its misreadings (and they are legion), imprudences, and, indeed, reifications of her as a suffering subject. (There's a particularly unforgettable image early on where the young Mary throws her body on top of her mother to shield her from her father's blows.)

In part, the fact that I can read around Godwin's impositions on Wollstonecraft is due to my internalization of the latter and also to the experience of the last two years, to my own reflections on why I once told The Poet that I don't believe in narrative (like many other people in my life, he thinks I should write a novel, which is laughable to anyone who reads this blog, I'm sure).


This post is also about feeling like I've spent this whole week doing work that gets consumed almost right after I produce it. Like I've been waking up at 7:00 in the morning to prepare for things that are over by 3. This is a weird way to live sometimes, especially because I don't feel actively stressed out. (Looks like there may be an advantage to dating a Zen master after all.)

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Related but tangential: Is there a bad version out there of Leonard Cohen's "Hallelujah"? This may be one of the most beautiful songs in the world.


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I hope that the effort it just took me to type all of this out is worth it in terms of clearing my mind so that I can work this weekend without obsessing. I really must get ahead on prep and finish the conference paper. And apply to the next conferences, of course. And read Coleridge, Gaskell, and perhaps some early Tennyson.

Now off to Williamsburg for drinks and dinner.

Speaking of static on the radio...

Tuning in to 1860: Researchers Play Tune Recorded Before Edison. Via NYT.

Just, wow. I think it's good sometimes to be reminded of the hauntingness (and haunted-ness) of recorded sound.

Undedicated: Jim White, "Static on the Radio"

In another life, this is the kind of song that would have me stop whatever I was doing and smoke a cigarette for its duration. In my current life, it's still pretty cool and haunting and I still stop everything I'm doing to listen to it and it makes me want to go driving in Wisconsin at dusk.

The important parts

He's nice to me. We enjoy each other's company. He makes me happy. I may like him back.

That's enough for now. The rest will work itself out, one way or another.

Back to writing.

Your loyalty is not to me, but to the stars above

(No reason, really, for the subject, just a line I kind of like from the Bob Dylan song currently playing on Radio Paradise.)

In one of the numerous ironies that characterize my life at any given time, I--who still maintain that I really shouldn't be in anything approaching a full-fledged relationship--seem to have spent the larger part of this weekend engaged in "where is this relationship going" conversations with not one but two other people. One is actually (I think) pretty simple and straightforward, something that I accept my complicity in and so on. The other involves The Poet and is still eating at me in a certain way because it so vastly changes certain calculations that I had made to allow this to be okay. It's hard to explain without getting into wildly unbloggable specifics, but, suffice it to say that I had to puncture a couple of illusions once and for all in the "I have nothing to give" conversation--he took that as being all about the sex, I told him that was the easy part--and I'm still unhappy about being placed even momentarily in a situation where I was risking more than I thought I was. But, on the other hand, I also find that I really like him, even given all the reasons I shouldn't, that he makes me happy, and that I don't have to listen to him complain or worry about things--while that last one is partially what contributed to the situation that pissed me off, these are all really huge things for me that I don't often find in people. The problem is that I don't want to be his girlfriend and I don't completely trust him not to accidentally fuck up my life. Stupid paradoxes. We're planning to meet up tomorrow night. I'll see what happens.

But I probably should revise what I said about Hegel on my other blog--it's not so much, perhaps, that there are a thousand ways to be unhappy, it's more that there are a thousand ways that your life can get fucked up.

Speaking of which (ah! transitions!), the Professor and I returned to West Village Coffeeshop today to work in tandem. It's possible that certain things are coming full circle (this is mostly true work wise), and that most of the bitterness and hurt has finally been bled out of our interactions. It's not just like it was, but I don't miss the differences. And it's nice to have my working buddy and best reader back. Between him and my friend S., I talked out how I need my conference paper to end, and I can see an end in sight and--more importantly--a non-sucking presentation in my future.

I went up to school to make some photocopies (why, why, why, have I never read The Madwoman in the Attic?? Who knew there was a chapter on "The Buried Life of Lucy Snowe??") and get a few other things done. No trip to the school library, of course, would be complete without seeing The K. He made eye contact with me this afternoon, which was a new thing. I alluded to his part in the weirdness that was new student recruitment Friday--a combination of weird tension in the basement computer lab, then his kind of swooping down on me from the second floor for a weird fasttalking conversation as I was on my way out. Every time I see him I feel a bit less, but I'd be lying to say I don't feel anything. I don't know if this is so much a question of being "over" him (I came into the situation more or less being already over him, knowing his position) as it is a kind of lingering sense of--well, something suspended, that keeps getting shaken up when we make eye contact or pretend not to see each other. And it's all very high school and I certainly don't want to continue the affair, such as it was, but I...I don't know, I guess I sort of feel like there should have been more, somehow, somewhere. And that's sort of silly, I know. And it has a hell of a lot to do with why I'm trying to keep The Poet at a certain distance. And I may well be kidding myself if I think I could really be a decent friend to him. Because we really were very kind to each other for a short time--and I guess that's what still...I don't know. Perhaps this is all to say that, even though I sent him that well-deserved "are you fucking kidding me" response to his notorious "douchebag" email, I don't have the heart to be that person all the time.

Believe it or not, I've also had a pretty decently productive weekend, in spite of all this. Friday was something of a lost day, but I made up for it on Saturday, and I get to read Godwin and Wollstonecraft for my committee member this week, which can't fail to make me happy. And my students are going to the library tomorrow, which gives me a reprieve on any formal preps.

At the moment, though, I have to turn my attentions to where I can find a loaf of decent bread on my way home. I have been dreaming of a bruschetta-like combination of avocado, corn, and Parmesan with some roasted asparagus all day....

Groggy.

You know, I had a decently productive day yesterday, after all. Sure, I had my period of enervation / distraction / tiredness in the afternoon, but once I put myself back on the timer, I was able to get a few things done. Finding out that the teaching observation that was supposed to take place today is getting moved didn't do much for my mood (it only required shifting around, oh, two weeks of my course planning, right at the beginning of the research unit, and getting the library involved to set the initial date), but, on the plus side, I didn't feel obligated to do much thinking about my class yesterday at all--which is exactly how Wednesdays are supposed to be when one teaches a class they've taught before on Tuesday and Thursday afternoons.

I wish all of my Wednesdays could be that way--if they had been since January I would not be so terrified that my orals are two months from tomorrow. (However, I'm sure I'll be able to get more done once the conference is over, and spring break is still almost a month in my future.) The problem is, though, that I can't work like that day after day. I woke up this morning (as I often do after a good day of work) much later than I wanted to, and I can tell already it's not going to be much of a morning. I'm sluggish and groggy, not really wanting to focus on anything (including this blog post), and all the ideas that I had while I was falling asleep--the ideas that, most probably, were the reasons why I couldn't fall asleep for ages--have all gone away and I'm sort of spinning my wheels until it's time to go to teach. (Since I do my Thursday office hours before class and have an errand I have to run first, I'm looking at leaving around noon for my 2:30 class.) I will do about 20 minutes of prep and plan to look at their homework and freewriting on the train, in my office, and during the beginning of class. And I'll maybe try to read some Genette or something. I also need to clean a bit. But I certainly had a different vision of what my teaching mornings were going to be, and I sort of hope that no matter where I teach in the fall, I can get something at least before noon.

Anyway. I'll figure out something. Better things are ahead. I'm going out with The Poet this evening. It's funny, in a way, because each time I get a little bit more...okay? with the whole scenario. I may devote a longer post to this later (and, yes, by now you may have realized that the "this deserves a longer post" is a classic blogo-rhetorical move with me), but all I'm going to say right now is this--it's nice to have someone in my life who thinks I'm great, who clearly thinks about me when we're not together. (This, I think, is the one limit that I always knew The Lawyer had--he could make you feel like you were the only person in the world while he was with you, but I don't think he thinks that much about people when they aren't there. Sometimes I wish I could be more like that.) While it would obviously be nice (and far more conductive to my not being the fucked up single older sister at my brother's wedding) if said person was neither married nor nearly 30 years odler than me, that's clearly just not in the cards right now. But we all know that I still don't have the energy for a "real" relationship right now--and I guess I just don't see why it has to be all or nothing.

In which I am the weird one in my family, part #835

My little brother just called to tell me he's about to get engaged to his longtime girlfriend this week. I thanked him for telling me himself rather than simply updating his relationship status on Facebook.

He's planning to get married sometime in the fall. Even as a woman with no real prospect of getting married anytime soon, this seems rather quick. (Then again, A's getting married in July...but that's going to be at City Hall and there are other issues.)

Is it self-centered of me to hope that I will have someone in my life who could make for an even remotely plausible *date* to this event, which I will no doubt have to be in in some bridesmaidenly (ha) capacity? Because bringing someone like The Poet would be...well, let's just say that it would be way more obnoxious than when I showed up for my brother's high school graduation with greyish hair.

I might as well start my summer '08 to-do list now:
* Write article for Important Online Journal
* Work on dissertation prospectus with the hope of getting it approved in September
* Finally finagle something publishable on Tennyson
* Find someone to bring to central Indiana as a date for my brother's wedding.

Oh, ack.

I wonder if M's free for the Fort Greene farmer's market this Saturday....

This has derailed me a bit from slogging through my conference paper in a way that even working on a timer can't fully solve.

Tangential

So, I'm typing my notes from reading Rousseau's Discourse on the Origins of Inequality and I find myself wondering whether The Matrix isn't, at bottom, an inherently Rousseauistic text. I mean, okay, it's a little bit too communitarian in the end, since Rousseau is all about the solitary individual, but what these works seem to share is the sense that man (against anything that Hobbes et al. would say) is essentially good (think Morpheus's defense against the Agent Smiths in the first movie, a scene that has always bothered me precisely because I am something of a misanthrope [yes! Shocking! I know.] and am also still shaped by a certain kind of Calvinist upbringing and would thus never suffer for those kinds of ideals) and a suspicion of "progress" in general as increasing our interdependece in a way that is ultimately detrimental to ourselves. And the Matrix movies also seem to share a belief that transparency in our language and interactions should be a goal--even if it can't be fully achieved--I mean, isn't that what the point of getting unplugged is?

I could be completely off base here, and it's been awhile since I've seen The Matrix while I was sober. And perhaps I'm being too reductive in limiting this just to Rousseau--perhaps there's a more general "Romantic" element of The Matrix to be explored? Surely someone's done that...(n.b. Google seems to say no to this, but Google also doesn't believe that I meant to search just for "romanticism" and so also pulls up hits for "the matrix" and "romantic," which is not particularly what I am interested in.)

Early to bed, early to...well, at least I woke up before the Brian Lehrer Show came on

(I'm trying to begin my days by blogging or at least journaling. Partly to remind myself to balance reading with writing. Also partly because if I don't write out some of this stuff I either brood about it and fail to work or I feel the need to tell people who don't necessarily need to know it.)

So I really thought that I was going to get up and start working at 6:30 or 7:00 this morning. When I rolled over it was 9:23 and I had been having one of my bizarrely crowded Wisconsin-related dreams. My whole family was at the house and then some. And K kept calling me but we never really ended up talking. Or he might have actually been there. I checked my messages when I got up this morning just in case this particular disturbance was occasioned by him rather than me. (We did have a sort of hurried and possibly planned on his part encounter in the library on Friday, but Friday was really complicated.) In retrospect, I realize the entire scenario was absurd because I don't get cell phone reception in Wisconsin. (Not the whole state, just where we are.) Or it might have been partially in St Louis. Oh, and I'm pretty sure that some of the characters from Friday Night Lights were there.

The point is that, in spite of my best intentions, I was in a dead sleep until 9:23. I must not have even heard the alarm go off. I think I need to get one of those alarm clocks that makes the room brighter because my bedroom doesn't actually have any windows. It's fine because I keep the door open to the living room, but when it's raining (like today) or just plain dark in the room, things can be pretty bleak. This may also be a necessity if I get that adjuncting job that would have me teaching composition in the Village at 8:00 in the morning.

Why I thought that it would even be possible for me to get up at 6:30 and start working requires a slightly longer explanation. For what it's worth, that's what I did yesterday. But let's go back to Sunday. On Sunday, I gratefully returned to my own home. Not that housesitting wasn't fun, but I was definitely ready to come back home. Also, the cleaning crew showed up at around 9:30 while I was in the shower. Granted, this was an improvement over their having woken me up at 8:25 on Friday morning, but it still increased my desire to head back to Crown Heights, especially since the information I had was that they were coming "midday." Anyway, I reestablished myself at home, then turned right around to go back to school, where I got about half of my grading done (the reading of the papers, but not the commenting or deciding grades) as well as a few other things, all with no awkward or painful run-ins with K. What did not get done, however, was grocery shopping, as somehow by the time I got back to Brooklyn, the Key Food, the fruit stand, and the overpriced yet okay in a pinch bodega fronting as a grocery store were all closed. Determined not to spend more money and time eating out, I went home to scrape together a meal from my extremely bare cupboards.

That turned out to be a mistake. Something I ate, whether the defrosted lentil soup from a couple of weeks ago, the frozen blueberries I had for dessert, or (as I suspect) a couple bites of tahini while the soup was heating up gave me stupid food poisoning. The irony of throwing up at 7:00 in the morning after my first night of sobriety in a week did not escape me.

So that kind of killed Monday. I cancelled my appearance at my field meeting, dragged myself across the street for ginger ale and a single sleeve of saltines that cost me $1.99, and resolved to wait the thing out until I could work again. That never happened. But, as a result, I ended up going to bed at around 9 and getting up at 5:30, and proceeding to work basically a 12-hour day, not including the commuting to teach. I got all the prep done, but had to take about two and a half hours after class to finish the grading. (That was too long, I realize.) After a trip to Target on my way home (I had to get some basic food as well as pens, as I completely ran out of stupid pens over the weekend, too), I was pretty exhausted, so I figured I'd just go to bed early again and get up early again.

Well, thus endeth that experiment. I kind of knew I was sunk last night when, despite being unable to keep my eyes open for even one more page of Newman's Apologia Pro Vita Sua, I found myself unable to stop tossing and turning. And I think my sleep was fitful, at best, especially if I was having those kinds of dreams. And I think my plans for the day were at best overly optimistic. If it continunes to rain, I'm not going ot the grocery store either. It's far enough away to be a pain in the ass and enough of a shithole not to be worth it if it's raining. This doesn't bode well for my newly-formed resolution to eat fewer processed foods and do more cooking, but, well, I live in the hood. People here clearly don't *want* decent grocery stores. And no matter what A. says, not all of us can just zip up to the Union Square Whole Foods to grab some fish. My friend M says she's going to start bringing me to the Fort Greene Farmer's Market to meet both seasonal produce and age-appropriate single boys. That may help get this resolution off the ground. I may also start trying to patronize the Flatbush Co-Op that I just read about, but not until my conference paper is written. That kind of excursion would also entail a fairly high probability of running into the K, since as best I can remember, it's basically around the corner from his house. Brilliant.

Yes, I realize this was an incredibly boring post, and one that's probably not going to be improved if I mention things like having rearranged my living room furniture, deciding that I need to slightly alter my approach to orals note taking, or saying that my plans for the day involve adding Victorian women poets to one of my orals lists, typing notes for Rousseau, and writing a draft of my Tennyson paper.

On the other hand, this may all be a fascinating placeholder for some of the other things that are going on. I'm still a bit emotionally hung over from Friday. For some reason, it was just so damn *complicated.* Suffice it to say that I did not, for example, expect Thursday night to end the way it did. It was something I'd thought about in a general sense, but apparently I'll do all kinds of things after that many drinks. (I haven't decide if I'm blogging that in full yet.) The morning was weird and restless, even when I had a decent seat for a couple hours at West Village Coffee Shop, then school was a bizarre series of run-ins. Not just the K, but some dude that I know from a completely different social circle and had an awkward non-sexual night with in December (I actually just saw and avoided him, feeling cowardly). And, potentially, at the back of the room where our recruitment event was being held, someone who may actually be responsible for the absolute worst thing that happened to me last year, something that I have told very few people about and may never blog. Plus a bunch of other encounters, renewals of friendships, long discussions--well, suffice it to say all I did during the day on Friday was sleep on the couch where I was housesitting and finish Confessions.

Anyway. I do have a lot of things to do today that I should probably start on, especially since I'm not into my fourth hour of work like I thought I was going to be, and also because I am seeing the Poet (my new pseudonym for the guy I don't really know how to talk about since he is absolutely 100% wrong for me and far too old and probably deserves to have a reputation as kind of an ass and yet makes me fairly happy at least in the sort of half-relationship that is all I am able or willing to have with him) tomorrow night which means I really must dispense with most of Rousseau today.

Okay, working.

Undefinable Wednesday

I would say that yesterday, though not work-productive, was at least emotionally and personally productive. The Professor called me out of the blue, and we spent a greater part of the afternoon hanging out, doing some work (I got more done than he did, but that's to be expected)--like old times, though without all the fraughtness. And it seems like we're friends again, to a certain extent. It was nice.

The evening wasn't bad, either. There were a certain number of political jokes that had to be made. And, again, I say to myself that it's nice not to wake up by myself all the time.

Now to do some laundry before I go teach. I have a feeling that the next week or ten days or so is going to be kind of a festival of suck, workwise, but at least that means I'll save money. This week has been fun, but a bit on the expensive side.

Scenes from a Tuesday

The first thing you should know about my day today is that the people I'm apartment sitting for told me that the cleaning lady would come on Saturday, supposedly around 10 or 11, but she actually showed up today at 9:45. Thankfully, I was post-shower and had pants on, but still--unnerving and slightly uncomfortable--I kind of just grabbed as much stuff as I could think of to take to Manhattan with me. One reason why I will never be part of the power elite is that I don't know how to handle these sorts of things.

I began the working portion of my day by reading Rousseau's account of his tweaking out when the Venetian prostitute he was in love with turned out to only have one nipple.

Speaking of which. At West Village Coffeeshop this morning, we sat around trying to figure out what crazy, dangerous thing it was that Spitzer wanted to do with the call girls. I'm going to be a bit let down if it was just "not wear a condom." Lame. Definitely not blowing up your career lame.

I'm still a bit bothered by last night's dinner. Like the way she always criticizes me for things like not being "good" at the kissing hello thing. Um, I'm from the midwest. And, really, 99% of my friends do not greet me the French way. It's not that it makes me uncomfortable, but it's just not so much what I "do." It's not the first time this has come up, and for some reason it seems emblematic. Also: knowing me for a certain number of years does not, in an absolute sense, privilege your read on my situation. It can help, but it isn't the last word. My Ex made this mistake a lot, and I was reminded last night of how much A. reminds me of him in some ways, and it makes me wonder how long our friendship can really last.

On the other hand, what do I know? I'm just the last one of that group not even remotely partnered, I let myself be in a horrible relationship for five years, I have a lot of sex, and some of it is with married dudes. Even if I were okay, she probably wouldn't believe me. And it could be all a defense on my part, right?

I'm bracketing this for now, though. I may run some of it past my friend M. (formerly of Chicago), who I'm meeting for drinks in a little bit. And I should get some pizza or something before that happens. I do want to do a couple of posts on this (sort of by way of definding my username)--first, on the idea of self-presentation and being okay; second, on what I meant when I said to A that I don't feel like I have much in common with her and our other mutual friends anymore--I *don't* think it's a matter of my being in school, which is what she thought--in part because I have this feeling about some grad school people too, sometimes.

For what it's worth, and I may have said this before, I'm not, like, wildly thrilled about the turns my life has taken recently, but I'm also not as completely mired in misery as I was. I think I get to let that be something.

For not to think of what I needs must feel

(With apologies, of course, to Samuel Taylor Coleridge.)

So for the last couple of days, I've been house-and-cat-sitting for one of my committee members and her partner while they're at an international conference. They don't live all that far from me, but it's a much nicer/cooler part of Brooklyn than where I make my own home, a part that I've always loved without actually being able to afford living there. It's a nice place, without being over the top or pretentious--though they're clearly people with very good taste who take pictures of themselves looking photogenic in culturally important locations. They are also the kind of people who don't keep any processed food around, and when they do, they put it in glass jars in the cupboard. (That's actually a good lesson for me, since I've already been making halfhearted attempts at living less on things that come from freezer sections and snack aisles.) I know they are doing me a favor by giving me this chance--and my committee member was right, it is really nice to be liberated from my own belongings, books, and distractions, but it's also left me feeling more than a little displaced as I muddle through the rest of my life at the moment. It's not a bad thing, and I'm certainly grateful, but I suppose I was hoping for a little, I don't know...inspiration? I mean, I've gotten a lot of reading done (this week, it's Rousseau's Confessions, Genette's Narrative Discourse, and a lot of guilt feelings about Tennyson), and it's not like I haven't been writing at all--it's just that the writing has mostly been notes on George Eliot novels and responses to my students' paper drafts. (At some point I would like to do a post on the amount of writing that goes into teaching comp--it's not something that I've seen covered before, but it's been on my mind, as several of my students have mentioned in conferences that they were pleasantly surprised that I read what they write and respond to it.)

What I really need to do is write my conference paper. There were a couple of minutes yesterday where I felt like the intro was coming together, so at least that's good.

I don't know what to do, though, about my larger feeling that I'm just existing. I mean, I do actually have things to blog about. For one thing, I saw The Professor last week. Those of you who came over from the last blog may remember the rather large role The Professor played in my life from mid-2006 until about six months ago, when he bailed on me as a friend shortly before my abortion. (Yeah, since my Ex doesn't have access to this space, I can just come right out with that one--but most of you know that already, and it still feels better just to have that in play, period--someday I'll do the narrative of what was by far *not* the worst thing to happen to me in 2007.) Anyway, he shows up late to the Victorian Seminar my department runs last Wednesday, and he's sporting this awful beard. Like, "adding ten years and the suspicion that you're kinda sketchy" awful. And in that moment, I realized I was completely over him. It was awesome. We did end up talking at dinner--almost like old times--but as we left, I felt this unfamiliar sensation--the sensation of feeling....nothing. It was good, but also contributes to my general detachment and coldness.

Bonus fallout from last Wednesday: an outburst of jealousy from Our Mutual Friend. This has always been kind of rumbling in the background, but it took several days and a certain finesse of emails to get it out. All I can say is, would that The Professor had ever found me "disconcertingly beautiful." My life would be much less complicated now. As it is, I find myself the object of a crush from someone I am just not attracted to and I feel guilty about it.

Tonight I had dinner with my old friend A. She is clearly worried about me. It's funny, though. Both The Professor and my friend J seem to think that I am doing well, but A doesn't buy it. I don't feel like I have much in common with her anymore. It's not so much the student thing. It's more living in Brooklyn on no money and not getting invited out and they're all busy being engaged to age-appropriate people while I go out with a dude who's not that much younger than my dad and who I can't really talk about with anyone. And everyone seems to have that friend they're going to introduce me to....

Is it wrong of me to just admit that I can't completely make myself happy, and that even waking up to --- is better than nothing, even though I know better?

I think I will appreciate my home when I return to it.

I know I have stopped making sense. I should post this and go to sleep so I can regret this in the morning.

I miss inspiration, though. The last time I felt it, really, was the brief period with the first married guy, whom I'll call the Evanescent K, currently playing the role of the self-proclaimed douchebag who avoids me in the library.

Discussion question: Am I scary? Because there are, apparently, plenty of dudes who think I am? Complication: My students apparently think I am fun and happy and nice all the time. I shocked one of them as we walked to class last week when I said that I sometimes yell at tourists who are moving too slowly on the sidewalk.

Yes, I have been drinking. I went home briefly on my way here to drop off books, check mail, and get my own towels, and decided to bring a bit of bourbon over here. But I can't judge alcohol when it's in a vitamin water bottle, apparently.

I am actually kind of homesick for my own apartment. I think that's a good thing.

Sky Blue Sky

Last March was all Ides for me, really--I've been betrayed by so many of these mid-50-degree days walking down from Midtown past Bryant Park. It's worth remembering through all of this that 2007 wouldn't have hurt so much if there hadn't been so many bluesky days and letting yourself hope even though everything else was against it--and I remember how he and I talked each other in to believing in Spring even though we should have been smarter than that and this was the first time that someone asked me to save him from himself and I couldn't do it. And today for the first time I'm not wearing my winter coat--the black jacket and blue hoodie have come out and the sun is shining and somehow I have to write this conference paper and maybe it will all be okay today and I'll work steadily for the next nine hours and everything will be okay, okay, okay. How am I doing? I said something about being okay, less wretched, even if it's for the wrong reasons. I'm still willing to make certain compromises because it's nice to be admired by someone even if you can't introduce him to your friends or your mother. And it will never lead to the stomachdrop excitement and the almost manic bouts of confidence--and maybe that's okay, too, for now.

Wilco: I didn't die, I should be satisfied / I survived, that's good enough for now...

I'm justifying my late start at work by the fact that I was talking with my adviser about my conference paper. I have almost 40 pages of notes--not to mention the seminar paper I wrote a couple years ago on this poem--but I still haven't quite tricked myself into writing the paper. Hopefully with the rest of today, tomorrow evening after teaching, and Wednesday morning, this will come together. Though there are a couple of other things that need to get done.

Tentative plans--
Rousseau until about 3:30
Paper research / Writing from 3:30-8
Break to try to do the scanning stuff again. Ugh. Also delete some things from my school hard drive.
Back to writing until 10:30--try to have something that I can print.

Tuesday morning
Prep / Print / Verify Roster / Send email about the in-class essay / Grade the stray paper / Input grades so far / Make conference schedule
Work on conference paper and Rousseau while students are doing peer review and in the evening.

Wednesday - All conference paper, all the time
Except after all the 19th century stuff, when I should try to finish Rousseau

Thursday - Prep / Rousseau / pack for housesitting gig.

I think your new haircut makes you look like a fool

...but of course I knew it was you the moment I saw you. I have pretty spectacular distance vision. Lucky me. And then I almost ran into you, when you were sitting on the floor in the aisle that has many of the books I work on but today I'm doing Tennyson not Coleridge so I didn't end up tripping over you.

Not that I'm going to be the one to talk first.

Yes, I *have* been a roiling pot of passive-aggressive angst today, and, no, it *wasn't* helped by having to quit working on my conference paper an hour and a half before the library closed only to spend that time trying to scan a bunch of stuff for my ridiculous workstudy assignment only to find that it's in the wrong file format and thus useless all because some dumbass was hogging the one scanner that doesn't have these problems by doing more than just scanning his documents, which is totally bad scanner etiquette so now I have to go back tomorrow and wrestle with this some more and do a bunch of other crap not related to my conference paper.

(For the record, technological shittiness and related issues of general library angst are the only things I get consistently upset about at my institution. This frustrates me even more than the fact that I still haven't gotten reimbursed for MLA. At least I got something out of that experience.)

The Mill on the Floss is less good than I remember it being.

I am going to drink a beer and then try to revisit what I can possibly cross of my to-do list when I'm in this mood. I'm thinking this would be a good time to tell the student who's missed six of the last nine classes that she's just out, plain and simple.